How I Knew I Wanted to be a Lawyer

I didn’t.

Don’t get me wrong. When I was in high school I thought I was fit to be a lawyer and was even asked by a number of my classmates caught smoking cigarettes and who were about to be kicked off the basketball team if I could I find a way to get them out of the punishment.

I read through the student manual, and found that there was no such punishment as kicking off the basketball team.

I told them this, and although I thought it was sound advice and was prepared to argue that, they thought that they didn’t want to continue the “appeal” because their parents would get mad.

Although I didn’t quite succeed, I remember that I was thrilled going over the rulebook and manual and finding that particular loophole. It was lawyerly kind of stuff.

And even my high school prediction (there is a program during our prom where we mention the predictions we have for each student), people thought I would be a lawyer.

So in a way it was predestined. And in college I took legal management because I thought I would go on to law school. But by the third year of college I had gotten a bit disillusioned because I went to court a few times and it didn’t work out too well. I had found the system horrible.

So I went into education instead (it was too late to switch majors, I just concentrated all my electives in my third year to teaching) and went to Ateneo Grade School to teach.

I thought that was my true calling in life. And for a few years, as I switched between Beijing, Manila and wherever, teaching all the time, I was happy.

Then some personal stuff happened and my life plan was pretty much ruined at that point. But I remember talking to a friend from Indonesia about the law in the Philippines and saying it was so problematic, and how it doesn’t change. He told me that perhaps the best way to change the law and system is to change it from within. That never left me.

So one day while stuck in Manila and doing nothing (remember my world had seemed to crash at that point) I just took the Ateneo Law entrance exam.

I passed it. Prayed about it. And then realized that perhaps that was why God meant for me to pass the entrance exam. ( I had done NO preparation for it and had taken it on a whim, and didn’t take any other entrance exam). I was meant to be a lawyer. And so I on went to law school.

So in a way it was a confluence of many things that made me go to law school. A feeling of fate and faith. A feeling that God had prepared each moment of my life for this (I would not have survived law school if I had gone on to it straight out of college. No discipline and none of the skills yet like writing etc).

I don’t recommend what I did, because it was very haphazard. Law school is very demanding and is something that one should seriously think about before jumping in. I went into it unsure, but by the first year grew to love the work and the pressure, the feeling of changing the world through the law.

Admittedly that feeling has waned somewhat since I have to split much of my time between law and my dreamgirl, and my dreamgirl obviously winds up winning in the battle for time.

But I cant imagine doing anything else with my life now. Except being a lawyer.

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